Home automation is not a new concept. For decades, glorified egg timers and clunky remotes have turned off and on lights, opened garage doors and controlled indoor temperatures.

So why are “smart homes” suddenly a buzzword in today’s technology market?

In truth, the answer isn’t even about your home. It’s about you — and, ultimately, your smartphone as an extension of yourself.

The first iPhone was released in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2012 when sales really picked up; that year, Apple sold 125 million iPhones. It was also the year that high-speed 4G LTE networking became widespread.

The consolidation of so many applications — email, music, social media, games — into one handheld connected device changed the world and almost everybody in it. There are now nearly 2.5 billion smartphone users on the planet, not counting those in developing countries that currently only aspire to own one.

At the same time, mobile networking capabilities have gotten faster, more reliable and more extensive, enabling us to connect from some of the most remote parts of the globe. The portability of the smartphone has made the Internet an integral part of our daily lives, no matter where we are.

Your phone has become your key to the world. So why can’t it also be the key to your home?

Smart-home possibilities are almost endless

The first question most smart-home novices ask hardware makers and installers is usually something along the lines of: What is this good for, and how far can I take it?

The good news is, you don’t need to build a new house to have a smart home.

In fact, even a 200-year-old rental can be easily converted into one without tearing into the wainscotting and fragile plaster walls. That’s because most smart-home devices primarily use conventional power outlets and wireless technologies — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, near-field communication and RFID — to communicate with each other and with the controller (i.e. a smartphone or tablet).

Although most adopters right now gravitate toward connected lighting and security, smart-home technologies truly run the gamut of functionality.

Maybe you’d like to automate your blinds, lights and heating/cooling system to save energy, or perhaps you’d like to have a kick-ass entertainment system and music that follows you from room to room. Or, maybe you want to turn your house into a near-sentient entity that knows your habits better than you do. Forget Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons — your house can be the robot.

Right now, your smartphone is the way you control all of these features. Lighting and electrical company Lutron, for instance, makes a user-friendly app called Caséta that not only controls Lutron-brand products, but also offers integrations with other smart-home technologies such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, Sonos, Nest and Samsung SmartThings. The app is essentially a universal remote for smart-home gadgets.

eQ Homes has partnered with Lutron to offer a high-quality Smart Home technology for all of their new single-family homes- townhomes and condominiums.eQ Homes /
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“You can automate anything from a single table lamp that comes on at dusk and turns off when you go to bed, or you can have up to 50 devices hooked up to the Caséta smart hub,” says Rob Ward, co-owner of Ottawa’s Arevco Lighting along with his wife Hera Arevian.

Their store began carrying Lutron products in 2015, a year or so after Caséta came onto the market. “We actually had some reservations about it until we installed it in our own home,” he adds.

It seemed complicated. Wasn’t a dimmer good enough? “It wasn’t until we actually installed it that we realized it was quite simple and convenient,” Ward says. Currently, the couple has got a few indoor and outdoor lights hooked up to Caséta.

Lutron has emerged as a smart-home standard for both DIY and professional installs, in large part because it’s straightforward to use and plays nice with other technologies. “I do Lutron only, nothing else,” says Matthew Taylor, the owner and president of Ottawa smart-home installer Tektam Integrations Inc.

Expensive novelty or cool functionality?

Smart-home technology feels very futuristic, and that’s undoubtedly a big part of its allure.

With a voice command or the mere push of a single button, you can trigger preset scenes in your home — that is, a sequence of events orchestrated to respond to a particular command. For instance, asking for your “Netflix and chill” scene could draw the shades, dim the lights, turn on the TV and do whatever else you programmed the command to do. “You make it your own,” says Taylor.

Still, even with projections putting the smart-home market at $127 billion by 2023, the trend remains a very niche market. People rightfully have concerns about online security. They’re also not convinced this technology will actually make life easier; if anything, it could make it more complicated. And it’s not exactly cheap, either.

As we saw in the Citizen’s previous article on connected homes, buying one outright means you can fold the cost into the mortgage. However, getting a professional to retrofit an existing home could cost anywhere from $5,000 for basic lighting and sound, to $100,000 with all the smart bells and whistles available. Meanwhile, hacking together a bunch of off-the-shelf devices — say, some Philips Hue lights, a few Wi-Fi-enabled power outlets, a smart doorbell, a few door and window sensors, a voice assistant, a bridge to make the devices work in concert and a new, high-security Wi-Fi router — could still cost between $500 and $1,000.

It’s unlikely that suddenly we’ll all wake up to robot homes one day; rather, the change will be far more gradual and will require habituation, security and consumer confidence. “[The industry] is running, but the public is still walking,” says Taylor.

Maybe it starts with automated lights and connected security cameras, or even an Amazon Echo — which is finally being officially launched in Canada on Dec. 5, by the way. Or, you might move into a rental outfitted with a Nest thermostat and Lutron light switches and you’ll use it simply because it’d be inconvenient not to.

At that point the technology will be easier to understand and use than ever before. Then, we’ll eventually grow more comfortable with issuing voice commands to a digital assistant, too. There won’t be any more buttons to push. Rather, you can simply say, “Alexa, set the Netflix and chill scene” and kick back while your home does all the work.

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